NVIDIA and NSF Launch $152M Open AI Research Initiative

Details

• NVIDIA and the U.S. National Science Foundation are partnering on the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, with a joint investment of $152 million.
• The project is led by the Allen Institute for AI and includes partners from the University of Washington, University of Hawaii at Hilo, University of New Hampshire, and University of New Mexico.
• NVIDIA will supply advanced HGX B300 systems featuring Blackwell Ultra GPUs to power the development of fully open multimodal AI models for scientific research.
• This collaboration is part of NSF's Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program and reflects priorities in the White House AI Action Plan.
• The initiative stands out by making all training data, code, evaluation methods, and documentation fully transparent and openly available to the research community.

Impact

This landmark initiative aims to close the gap in academic access to advanced AI technologies by creating open, national-scale research infrastructure. By democratizing powerful AI tools, the project reinforces U.S. leadership in scientific innovation and sets a benchmark for transparency in collaborative AI development.